It’s good to see a good guy get his due.
Health IT veteran and friend of MedCity News Brian Ahier this year will be stationed at Aetna’s booth at the upcoming HIMSS conference, touting the Healthagen arm of Medicity as director of standards and government affairs, reports Healthcare IT News‘ Scott Tharler. In essence, the self-described “policy wonk and technology geek” will be doing what he does best — exhorting the virtues of health information exchanges. And social media will play a big role, too.
As Healthcare IT News puts it, who better to lead the effort on HIEs than a man with h-i-e right there in his last name? The healthcare industry as a whole is “at a critical point heading into this year’s conference,” Healthcare IT News says.
“We’re moving away from strictly talking about meaningful use to talking more about how we actually transform our healthcare system,” Ahier says, noting that healthcare is finally catching up with the 21st Century.
“In every other industry, they’ve adopted technologies because they make sense, are more efficient and ultimately more profitable,” he goes on to say. “And in healthcare, because of our perverse incentives, we’ve had to drag people kicking and screaming into the 21st century.”
One notable exception, however, is how healthcare has taken to social media. Numerous recent examples abound, ranging from the Mayo Clinic’s set of open-source social media policies to researchers using tweets to analyze risk for heart disease.
“The healthcare industry has really been leading the charge in incorporating social media into the broader marketing and communications efforts,” Ahier says.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
While overcoming challenges of interoperablity will be a key effort of the industry this year, social media presents a significant opportunity for healthcare, particularly as it relates to patient satisfaction, which are being tied to reimbursement rates, giving providers obvious motivation.
So long as it’s patient-focused, Ahier believes the use of both social media and technology will come further into focus.
“If we can improve the health of the community, then the side effect of that is that you can lower costs and people that develop these really cool technology tools can also make a lot of money.”
On health data and interoperability, he says:
“We really need to be able to aggregate data across the community to build out a longitudinal health record, so we can improve care coordination; but also so now we can start to pull in these other data sets — even patient-generated health data. From a policy standpoint, we’re seeing a lot of interest in incorporating patient-generated health data into this massive data set.”
